Aero the Acrobat

He swings from the Super NES and Genesis platformer to the GBA in a decent portable conversion.

By now, you've probably grown to accept the fact that the Game Boy Advance is a perfect haven for ports of existing Genesis and Super NES franchises. In the GBA system's first year, we've seen both exact ports and crappy ports of familiar 16-bit brands, and the latest entry to the world of GBA revisits is Metro 3D's Aero the Acrobat. It's definitely a solid effort, with a decent level of variety in its design...but the game's spastic control and cheap platform layouts do make it a slightly irritating adventure. Beware of the spikes. Spikes are your enemy.

Features

24 levels, standard and bonus

Cartridge save (Three slots)

Only for Game Boy Advance

Aero the Acrobat was developed during the age when every company needed its own "Character with Attitude" platformer. Aero was Sunsoft's attitudinal critter when David Siller, whose recent claim to fame is Capcom's PS2 hero Maximo, and Iguana brought the character to life on the Super NES and Genesis over a decade ago. Aero's kind of an all-around hero...since he's a circus performer he can pull off all sorts of moves, and these moves are incorporated in his first adventure when this mean, eccentric billionaire causes havoc with the circus and kidnaps all the attendants and even his girlfriend. Or so the story goes anyway. You don't really need to know all this...just complete all the challenges and defeat all the boss, and you're good to go.

Aero's adventures cuts across almost two dozen different levels and four different locations. The game's charm is definitely its variety, since Aero's levels aren't just of the hop-the-platform-and-get-to-the-exit designs. The developers worked in a lot of gameplay elements that offer a wide assortment of non-traditional level designs and challenges, encouraging that all-important replay value. One level, for example, requires you to find five switches around the level, each one flicking on the lights in the tent. The problem is, all you have to work with is a spotlight that follows you where you go...the rest of the screen is near pitch black, only brightening up when you find each switch. Other standard challenges include bouncing off trampolines and teeter-totters to leap through mid-air rings or grab bonus items, or find star platforms and remove them from play by hopping on them a couple of times. Some levels even feature rollercoaster rides, log flume slides, tightrope walks, and bungee jumps. You have to do all this while nailing the evil clowns and such wandering around the levels...Aero can spin-attack enemies by double tapping the jump button, and he can also shoot stars at them if he's got them in his inventory.

The game even features the famous Mode 7 high dive bonus level, which really makes you wish Nintendo would get up off their duff and make Pilotwings for the system. The level isn't anything more than the parachuting freefall from Nintendo's SNES flight simulator, but it's still a bit of fun that shakes up the action between levels, and looks pretty impressive on the Game Boy Advance screen as well.

Aero the Acrobat is a solid design, but its problems do stick out awkwardly. Many levels require players to hop around on single-tile platforms or tiny balloons, but since Aero's movements are quick and slippery, it's a challenge in itself to get the guy to accurately land on these ledges. Most levels also use a cheap tactic of laying spikes out all over the place...many of which are out of sight until the player just stumbles or bounces into them. It's a minor issue, since the game features a ton of health power-ups and extra level icons throughout each level, but in later levels, certain spikes cause single hit deaths. And that's just straight-out irritating. The abundance of extra lives does make the game a little on the easy side...and with the cartridge save recording the status after each level, players can zoom through the adventure in a short weekend. Not that the cartridge save is a bad thing. In fact, the developers went one welcome step further by adding high score save slots for ever single level in the game. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a menu option that let you peruse this data at your leisure...you have to let the game cycle through them automatically.

The original SNES graphics look great on the Game Boy Advance LCD screen, with well-drawn pixel art and animation for Aero, enemy characters and foreground objects. Backgrounds scroll with several layers of parallax, all done with no glitching or slowdown...something unfortunately seen in several SNES-to-GBA platform conversions. The music is also reproduced on the GBA hardware, though it sounds forcefully electronic...the tunes are a definite acquired taste.

The Verdict

I missed out on the Aero "craze" when it hit the Genesis and Super NES back in the early 90s...I may have played one or two levels back in the day, but I definitely hadn't played it long enough to get a good idea of how the Game Boy Advance version differs to it. The conversion produced by Atomic Planet looks and sounds really decent, definitely showing off a high level of capability in reproducing an existing game on a new platform...more specifically, showing off their abilities in developing for the GBA system itself. Aero the Acrobat the game is a solid platformer, with quirks and issues keeping it from reaching that "awesome" status. It's just "good." Almost "great." But not quite "awesome."